Thursday, February 14, 2013

A Letter to a Community In Need Of Healing

"During the search for Christopher Dorner, and subsequent confrontation and murder, I thought often about Larry Davis. I concentrated on the fact that in mist of the media and journalistic efforts to characterize him as a scourge, and contextualize him as practically an enemy of the state, one key point had been dropped from the mainstream's narrative: the allegation of corruption and police misconduct in the LAPD.

This erasure coupled with the odd mixed messaging around the cabin fire believed to have taken Dorner's life. The sum of this situation, has pushed me to reflect on my views and understandings of criminality; justice; power; violence; and healing. It has led me into critical intellectual engagement with the ideas, practices, and compositions of family, community, and law enforcement--the things that are supposed to mediate. It also has become a point in time that is strained onto my consciousness, where racial history and experience confronts the impact of systems and present day socio-economic conditions.

I sent the trailer of a soon to be released documentary on Davis' life to a friend. I then wrote a follow up email to to reflect on all this; to try to make sense of it. I share it here, with a few edits, as a letter to our community in name of historical memory, healing, and strengthening."

I grew up hearing that story. Crazy. When people do not understand my
trepidation with law enforcement and the criminal justice system, I have
to explain that it is not because I am an apologist for those who commit
crimes.

My angst is around this history of
practicing corruption and the usage militaristic strategies and tactics to unjustly destroy
communities and ruin lives. In combination with the lives destroyed by
the drugs themselves (both street dealers and the White
operatives that facilitated and profited from distribution), we
cumulatively have:

1. fractured families

2. missing parents

3. psychological trauma

4. stigmatized communities

This
has become multi-generational. Me and you see it now, almost two
generations later, when we are trying to figure out why so many young
people are directionless, why so many adults make such poor decisions
and set such a poor example, and why the character and will does not
exist within our people en mass. And that those who have not become overwhelmed by the above are the outliers, and not the median.

How to understand this? How to think about beginning to strengthen the positives that exists, scaling them up, while also filling gaps and addressing persistent problems?

It makes me think about the Panthers, because their analysis was systemic, and they engaged in "wrap-around" services before social policy popularized it. From free breakfast, to community education, to health care.

It is not because they were radical or oppositional, that their work and thought endures. It is not just romanticism and being arrested by the past. Rather, it is that they cohesively explained and understood how all the parts matter--it was not just economic, or just cultural. The entire social prism; the entire life experience; they strove to learn about each component, and then developed strategies and actionable steps to address it. The approach is a model for us. It is the right frame. We just are looking at different picture; one altered by the events of the last three decades of the post-Black Freedom Movement.

So we look for models of people in this current moment, who are working on framing and changing the current picture. People like ____ are trying to rebuild and heal. Me and you are
spending what must be the equivalent of weeks on g-chat talking through our ideas about what might be the
causes and problems and solutions. And we read and think about what
to do about this mess; like where to start. And then we volunteer, and listen, and reflect, as we try to grapple with what to do with our thoughts and our lessons-learned.

But
we have a macro system that isn't invested in improvement, healing, and
empowerment. We have a structure not designed to do those things either.
It is premised on social inequality, and its strongest feature is its ability to reproduce itself. Which makes this observation saddening: our folks haven't had the clarity and balance to stop making
it worst; to stop adding self-inflicted wounds to these problems. It
makes what you and I want to achieve challenging. But thinking about
this as a whole, it does not overwhelm me. Instead, it just reminds me
how deep it is, and that it will take time. The project is big. We
just gotta keep getting tools, keep working, and remembering that it
takes time.

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You Can Find Me...

Michael is Chief Research and Policy Officer for Young Movement Inc. He also is the co-founder and co-director of The Bronx Brotherhood Project, a community-based youth development program designed to provide college readiness and adult male mentorship to low-income Bronx Black and Latino high school males.

Born, raised, and currently living in the South Bronx, he is a political economist, ethnographer, and educator. His writing centers on how innovation and diversity becomes the expertise and cultural capital of millenials. Michael's work in local communities focuses on practices and models that create sustainability, and economic development premised on entrepreneurship, local ownership, social mission-orientated private sector efforts, and the development of small and medium sized businesses.

FROM THE LENS OF A HIP-HOP BABY

Articles, editorials, commentaries, essays, and other writings here that shares a part of myself with the world. Read, criticize, argue, debate freely; BUT do so in the spirit of love, in a commitment to better this world, and to bridge the racial, social, and economic problems of this world.